1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to task collaboration through instant messaging.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include document libraries, instant messaging, chat rooms, and application sharing.
Conventional collaborative computing includes combinations of collaborative technologies in order to provide a means for members of a collaborative community to pool their strengths and experiences to achieve a common goal. A collaborative computing community generally can be defined by (1) a particular context, i.e. the objective of the environment, (2) membership, i.e., the participants in the environment, (3) a set of roles for the members, and (4) resources and tools which can be accessed by the membership in furtherance of the objective of the environment. Roles are names given to the people in the environment which dictate access to the resources and tools within the environment as well as define the behavior of the community members.
Amongst often used collaborative components in a collaborative environment, instant messaging remains of paramount importance. In an instant messaging environment, one or more collaborators can exchange messages shown to be arranged in a single space visible by all. Thus, the instant messaging component aims to mimic a human-to-human conversation in which the real-time nature of the exchange of written conversation between participants can be limited only by the speed in which participants can read, digest and reply to the contributions of other contributors who are party to the instant messaging session.
Oftentimes within an instant messaging session between collaborators, one collaborator will request that the other collaborator complete a task. Ordinarily, in this circumstance, it remains incumbent upon the recipient of the request to schedule the task within the collaborative environment and to complete the task as scheduled. For the requestor, however, there is no way to determine whether or not the task has been completed. More to the point, there is no way for the requester to know even if the recipient of the request has scheduled the task. Consequently, additional points of collaboration—particularly frequent e-mails and instant messages—are required on the part of the requester to ascertain a current status of the assigned task and to determine whether or not the recipient of the request has completed the task or has progressed towards completing the task.